Seven Common AWS IAM Misconfigurations That Put Cloud Accounts at Risk
Security researchers at Shieldly identified seven recurring IAM misconfigurations found in a large number of AWS accounts after extensive policy analysis. The most critical include overly broad permissions such as wildcard actions and resources, which effectively grant administrator-level access to unintended principals. Other frequent issues involve misconfigured PassRole and AssumeRole permissions scoped to all resources, trust policies with an open principal wildcard, and missing ExternalId conditions that expose accounts to confused deputy attacks. Inline policies attached directly to users pose additional audit and lifecycle risks, as they are harder to track and do not transfer when a user is recreated. For each misconfiguration, the recommended fix involves scoping permissions to specific ARNs, explicit principals, and condition keys rather than relying on broad wildcards.
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